The Lost Treasure of Lorne

Chapter Two

There he was again, flaunting his muscles in her direction. Or perhaps he sought the admiration of the maids and the female ghosts. Both groups were watching; the maids finding reasons to pause at windows around the courtyard and the ghosts, flagrant hussies, giggling together in a crowd right where the duke was pouring a bucket of water to stream off his black hair and run in rivulets down his back and chest. They stood so close that his elbow passed through one particularly bold wanton, and she squealed with delight.

Michael could not see or hear the ghosts by daylight; neither the lassies nor the menfolk materialising to chase the laughing girls away, scorching the oblivious duke with black looks that promised a retribution they no longer had the power to deliver.

A rider burst from the dark arch of the gatehouse, bringing his horse to a showy stop inches from the well casing, startling the ghosts into an unnecessary leap to avoid a collision that could no longer have consequences. Caitlin could not have stopped her smile if she wished; she clapped her hands, then closed her books, leaving her room in such haste she abandoned the quill in the ink well.

By the time she emerged into the courtyard, the rider had dismounted to greet the duke, the two of them clasping forearms as they exchanged news of the month since last they met.

Caitlin stopped her precipitous rush, slowing to a walk better suited to the dignity of a duke's housekeeper. Let father and son have a few moments of privacy. She glared at the ghosts, and they slunk a few feet further back, but their movement alerted John to her presence, and he pulled away from the duke and took two long strides to reach her.

"Morgie, darling." For form's sake, she protested as he picked her up, hugged her, and swung her around. She used to greet him in that fashion when he was just a little boy, and he had reversed the tradition when he grew to tower over her.

"You have grown another two inches, Master John. I swear it."

"All the better to lift you, Morgie." He had his father's height, though not yet his breadth, and his father's black hair, close cropped to allow comfort under a gentleman's wig. His eyes were his mother's, blue as a summer sky. Half Lorimer, half Normington, and altogether dear. Caitlin had rescued him and raised him. And if anything in the world could tempt her to throw out caution and common sense and allow the Duke of Kendal to make her his duchess, it would be the right to call this precious boy her son.

But John would be twenty in a week, on the last day of August, and was already making his own place in the world. He did not need her, and Michael would not want her if he knew all.

Caitlin took refuge in her job. "Your room is prepared, and I have ordered a venison pie and carrot pudding for dinner." John's favourites. A stable hand came to take John's stallion, passing heedlessly through the throng of ghosts. Most shifted out of the stable lad's path, but one man in the ruffled collar of a cavalier placed himself four-square in the way as he led the horse to the stables.

The eleventh marquis. The tragedy of the Lorimers and Normingtons had played out in his lifetime, as it had before and since. His daughter had taken her own life after her father murdered her Normington suitor before her eyes.

John and Caitlin both winced when the young groom marched unseeing through the cavalier's chest, then turned to soothe and scold the horse as it danced sideways. The ghost shook his fist in an attempt to further spook the horse, but desisted at their glare.